Essay 1: The Yellow Wallpaper: Choose one or more incidents in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and explain what is disclosed and what is concealed in the story between the characters. How does this technique affect the reader's interpretation of the events in the stories? Compare an event from your life that is similar in terms of having both disclosed and concealed information. What did you learn from this?

I, thankfully, have not ever been in the situation that Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about in The Yellow Wallpaper. I have only witnessed what being in a confining relationship can do through my dearest friend’s struggle in her marriage. On the outside you would think that everything is peachy keen, but the happy exterior is concealing a deep dark secret. I cannot pick just one incident in the story to write about. I feel like every incident is very important to telling the whole story. You learn a lot about the narrator’s illness and marriage in her opening lines. She admits that her husband John, who is also her doctor, is very condescending. When they move into the rental house for the summer, he belittles her thoughts on the house and on her illness. While she feels she needs stimulation, he is adamant that she needs to lie still and have no stimulation at all. In the journal she describes the wallpaper that is in the room that John picked out for her recovery. She uses very descriptive imagery to describe how “revolting” the color and pattern is. Inside of what she considers her prison the wallpaper becomes her distraction. She has varying emotions towards the wallpaper. She is at first scared of it and then it becomes more and more interesting to her. She eventually starts seeing a trapped woman inside of the pattern. By the end of the story she has started trying to free the woman in the paper and in essence herself as well. The narrator talks about longing to write but John forbids her to do so. She longs to work and write but he has forbidden her...

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...Progress for Feminist: “The YellowWallpaper”
Rachel Hendricks
Shorter University
Abstract
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1892) story, “The YellowWallpaper,” shows a young woman confined to her own home going completely insane. The setting of the story shows the dominant husband controlling her and making her condition worse.
Progress for Feminist: “The YellowWallpaper”
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, English Standard Version). Late 19th century women were fighting for change in regards to the social norms and expectations forced upon them by traditions and male domination. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The YellowWallpaper" is a short story that depicts the position of a married, middle-class woman who accepts her role as a quiet and dutiful wife. John her husband, who is also a doctor, assumes his role as wise and superior male with pride. Gilman uses metaphors in this story to show the different ways which women struggle in a society dominated by men. Examples are a submissive marriage, forbidden development or expression, and physical confinement, Gilman proclaims an early feminist message of the need for immediate change.
Gilman uses the marriage contract between the narrator and John as a metaphor in the plot...

...The freedom and independence women have in today’s society did not come casually. It is the result of many feminist intellectuals that advocated reforms in the definition of women’s role in the deformed social structure of nineteenth century America. “The YellowWallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents to readers the domesticated female oppression in the late nineteenth century that haunted many women. Written in 1892, a cultural context where society dictates that women listen to their husband, Gilman confronts the issue of the legitimate victimization of women in this short story masterpiece. The silent female imprisonment in the domestic sphere is revealed in this story through the mind of Jane, who is recuperating in the nursery room of a mansion for three months, which her physician husband believes is the appropriate treatment. She is restricted to that room and begins to write her thoughts and feelings. The mental pain she undergoes soon takes over her mind and behavior and, ultimately, drives her to insanity. Over the course of the story, Jane, like other women of her time, suffers from her mental illness and the obligated submission to her husband, and through her suffering, Gilman acquaints the audience with the era and Jane’s unfortunate debilitating nervous condition.
Readers are first introduced to Jane’s suffering when she mentions that even her husband did not believe she’s sick, but believes, instead, that its...

...that it could eventually causes them to slowly go insane? In Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The YellowWallpaper" she uses the techniques of foreshadowing, personification, simile, and symbolism, in order to acknowledge how easily humans are convinced and influenced in their daily lives. One's own perspective on themselves can quickly be changed as they are exposed to different thoughts from others and objects that are disturbing, unwanted, and forced. These influences can cause a person to rethink everything they believe and take something else into consideration. It can cause someone to feel completely suffocated to the point where they lose themselves in the focus on analyzing something that is slowly deteriorating them.
Disturbing objects and images can cause someone to question and focus in on what they truly mean and are depicting. In the short story by Gilman, she describes a pattern on the wall. It is unlike any pattern and has the ability to cause the woman trapped in the room to question what it is. The pattern "curves for a little distance [then looks as thought the lines] suddenly commit suicide" (Gilman 288) and lose themselves as they disappear off the wall. This description of the design is showing foreshadow to how the ill patient in the room is slowly crumbling inside. As she is so focused and concentrated on the color, smell, and pattern of the wallpaper she is destroying her mind and in the end seems to...

...“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity.”
-Oscar Levant
“The YellowWallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story based on a woman’s struggle with power, depression, and fear. In it, Gilman writes the short story using literary devices such as symbolism to demonstrate how the main character drives herself into complete dementia.
At first, it seems as if the main character is completely normal, talking only about her husband and how happy she is that he has taken her on a summer vacation to a beautiful home that she adores. She suffers from a state of nervous depression and her husband becomes her primary caregiver. Her treatment requires that she do almost nothing active, and she is especially forbidden from working and writing. Reluctant to listen to her husband, she starts to write in a secret journal that she keeps in an attempt to relieve her mind.
In the journal, the woman begins describing the house in particular detail, revealing disturbing things and thoughts in her mind. She begins to focus on a particular piece of leftover wallpaper at the end of one of the walls in the room she occupies. Describing it with confusion not understanding the reason of why someone would put such wallpaper in a room.
The wallpaper, as she describes, is yellow with lines and shapes going in different directions. The author does an excellent job of making it seem that the...

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Professor Gail Upchurch
English 102
3 February 2014
“The YellowWallpaper”
For centuries women have been subjected to restraints of society. Finding and creating our own individuality and freedom has been nothing but a great war; woman have won major battles, but history will always remain. In the short story “The YellowWallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator keeps a journal of her time while “recovering” from her illness. Her husband and sister in law both keep watch over her while keeping her confined to the top room of the house. In this time and space she faces many challenges, some within her own mental state. Restricted to spending her days and nights in this big empty room with only the stimulation of the yellowwallpaper, the narrator finds herself lost in her own mind and thoughts. With her husband in control of her activities, the nature of a women’s role in society at the time, and the confining characteristics of the room with the yellowwallpaper, the narrator finds herself trapped, fighting to get from behind bars.
The narrator’s husband, John, is a physician, which goes to say his authority is respected. She (the narrator), never questions or crosses his word, even though she doesn’t believe it, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good”...

...Priyanka Chopra
May 10, 2010
A Male Perspective of Women’s Hysteria in “The YellowWallpaper"
Critics view Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The YellowWallpaper" as either a work of supernatural horror or as a feminist treatise regarding the controversial role of women in society. A close analysis of Gilman's use of symbols reveals "The YellowWallpaper" as her response to the male view of hysteria from ancient times through the nineteenth century. " In "The YellowWallpaper" Gilman questions the validity of Hippocrates's theory of the wandering uterus and Weir Mitchell's "rest cure". As she wrote in her essay "Why I Wrote the YellowWallpaper?", "[the story] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy…" (Gilman 107). By her own account, Gilman's purpose in writing "The YellowWallpaper" was to educate and inform the public of the misinterpretation of hysterical symptoms.
The origin of the word hysteria expresses the belief in the inferiority of women. As James Palis writes in The Hippocratic Concept of Hysteria: A Translation of the Original Texts: "Etymologically, the term usteria (hysteria) derives from ustera (hystera), the Greek word for uterus, which means an inferior position. Thus, usteria denotes suffering of the uterus,...

...Gilman was a feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she represented a role model for future generations of feminist because of her unusual concepts and life style. Her best work today is her semi-autobiographical short story “The YellowWallpaper” which she wrote after a severe struggle of postpartum depression. This was an age in which women were seen as “hysterical” and “nervous” beings and when a woman was claimed to be seriously ill after giving birth, her claims were sometimes dismissed as being invalid. In the story “The yellowWallpaper” the narrator (Jane) a young-upper- middle class woman who is going undergoing care for postpartum depression is forced to live in a isolated country house where her husband John prescribes her with a method call the “rest cure” which instead of helping her it just causes more harm than good. For Jane the fact of no doing anything causes her breakdown. The more she gets isolated from reality she begins to hallucinate. Not only her treatment but also the yellowed wallpaper that is in her room become her obsession, trying to figure out its patters and starts to hallucinate a women that it’s trapped in the wall. The story The YellowWallpaper it’s a story in which the woman back then in 1890’s were constantly criticized by men because they were not able to speak for themselves. Woman lack of self...

...manipulation and degrading of female experience through the use of medical treatments and power structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “ The YellowWallpaper” is a perfect example of these themes. In writing this story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew upon her own personal experiences with hysteria. The adoption of the sick-role was a product of-and a reaction against gender norms and all of the pressures and tensions that their satisfaction demanded. Gilman’s essay uses autobiographical experiences displayed as doppelganger quality the in the main narrator of the story, Jane. Set during the late 1890s, the story shows the mental and emotional results of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era for neurasthenia and the narrator’s reaction to this course of treatment. It appears Gilman’s writing was focused on past experience and the anguish that arose from treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her daughter Katherine. But from the reader’s perspective, one and come to can assumption that expressing her negative feelings about the popular rest cure is only half of the message that Gilman wanted to send. Within the subtext of this story lies the theme of oppression: the oppression of the rights of women especially inside of marriage. Gilman was using the woman or the women behind the wallpaper to express her personal views on this issue.
The two common threads that connect...